Final Project Proposal: Shoe Rack Elevator
Aaron Kang, PS70 2023
My first idea for a final project was an automated garage shoe rack of sorts for the tons of shoes that we have in our dorm between myself and my roommate.
In any given Asian household, there is a pile of shoes by the door, and my roommate and I are no exception. Between our running shoes, boots, slippers, and everyday walking shoes, our measly salvaged shoe rack can't hold them all. Furthermore, it's difficult among the pile of shoes to find the shoe that you want quickly. Being on the ground also causes us to have to bend down to store the shoes and to access them -- a smaller problem, but one that I will attempt to address with my project.
Typical shoe mess, my current shoe mess in my dorm.
I want to build my new shoe rack elevator based on the design of car elevators used in places like New York City where space is limited for parking. With these car carosels, the cars are stacked vertically and move on a vertical chain of sorts to bring any given car down to the ground level to be retrieved by the driver. Instead of cars leaving out the bottom, my machine would be transporting shoes up to the top so that I can reach them.
This idea isn't just limited to shoes, however. Scaling down this project would make for a great desk organizer to store many small objects in the carousel and to have them brought to a convenient height. Alternatively, you could load up certain outfits into the carousel and have them readily accessible.
As an extension to this project, I also want to program a microcontroller on the motor mechanism of the carousel to allow me to control the mechanism from my computer. With a website, I could choose a certain shoe to retrieve and have the carousel rotate around to that shoe. Furthermore, this would serve as a catalog of the items in the rack so that I don't forget what's in the mechanism.
Live footage of me trying to remember which shoes I have.